Dismounting, Miguel Alvarado stepped swiftly to the girl's side, threw
his arms about her shoulder and waist, and drew her back among the trees
and out of sight of those about the fires. She did not scream; she did
not seem affrighted in the least. Only when he strove to kiss her, she
put a slow but determined hand upon his forehead and pushed away his
impetuous lips.
He forebore to combat her for that which she would not give. Crushing
her to him, he whispered triumphantly, "Ah, my Paquita, maiden of my
soul! Did I not say rightly, when I said we should meet again?"
Evidently she had not been quite certain whom he was until he spoke. For
now, she writhed free from his arms, her face contorted with loathing
and wrath.
"So you come sweethearting again, you vile louse of a Busno! Si,
seguramente, si--we meet again! But I met with hunger when I was a
child, and I met hunger often since, and I like hunger the less at each
of our meetings. The same with the cholera! The same with you!"
A cold and haughty tower of ivory, she faced him. Her face was superbly
royal with high disdain.
"Go away at once or I will set our scavenger curs on you! Have I not
warned you before this never to approach me with your treacle words of
love, your kissing lips that turn my blood to vinegar, your caressing
arms that make my skin shudder and creep? Go away, you itch, you
ringworm! You are not a man; there is nothing masculine, varonil, strong
and savage about you. All you can do is to moon and coo and sigh; you
are a sot ever thirsty for love; you are a soft, shapeless blubber of
passion! And how can you come near me when you know you are one of the
order of men who murdered my brother for poisoning a few poor pigs and
for stealing a few poor horses?--you, a man of the Guardia Civil, the
enemy of my clan and race since time out of mind; our blight, our
scourge!"
Beneath the bite and lash of her words, beneath the scorching fire of
her scorn-filled eyes, a lesser man than Miguel Alvarado would have
shriveled into a smoking black cinder. But never he. Folding his arms
across his chest, he waited in a dramatic silence while the wrack and
tempest swept over him. Then, slowly, theatrically, he raised his arms
above his head, and uplifted his eyes, and addressed himself to the
serene heavens--under the circumstances, the obvious and altogether
Spanish thing to do.
"Senor Don Dios!" he apostrophized solemnly. "My soul leaps like a flame
with love for her--I love her unto death. And she repulses me! What
shall I do?"
Go away and leave her victorious in her disdain? Not Miguel Alvarado!
When Pascual Montara finished questioning the Gypsy chieftain and
hetman, and came seeking his compañero through the trees, he found them
together still--the hot-blooded young policeman and the lithe Paquita of
the nut-brown legs. Miguel Alvarado had progressed some way with his
bitterly contested love-making. But she still shrugged away from him
when impetuously he approached too close.
Having left his horse in a distant quarter of the clearing, on foot
through the gloaming came Pascual Montara; and, glimpsing the girl in
the shadow of the trees, he halted dead and eyed her with wonder and
admiration. She wore a printed calico dress of deep vermilions and
flaming saffrons, and a grass-green scarf was wound, in the Gypsy
fashion, among her ink-black tresses. There was a string of copper coins
upon her bosom and a bangle of copper coins upon one wrist. Her dress
came but little more than half-way down her bare, symmetrical and richly
polished legs, and it was open at the throat to show glimpses of her
small brown breasts and of the swale between.
Letting Miguel Alvarado talk as he willed, she stood watching him out of
slow gloomy eyes. His elocution was fluent, full of zest, soul-moving;
his words were gorgeous, magnificent, glowing with color and music. One
moment he called her a baggage, a jade, a wanton, a thing of ugliness, a
soiled and tawdry wench. The next, he called her a virgin most pure,
most chaste, most admirable, and endowed her with every beauty and charm
ever conceded by a lover's tongue, appraising separately and in sequence
her features, her contours, her color, the texture of her skin, the
fineness of her hair. With bold, splendid splashes of color and
enunciation, he lifted her up, up from the degradation and the mire to
which he so lately had debased her, and put her upon the apex of the
world, erecting her upon a pedestal above all other women, his words a
coronation, a canonization, and an apotheosis. When he had done, she
raised a little brown hand to her mouth, and yawned prodigiously. Then
she turned away.
Pascual Montara came forward, loudly rattling the fallen leaves with his
feet to apprise Alvarado of his nearness.
"Let us be on our way," he said. "I have questioned this Pepe Flammenca
and others of the Gypsy bucks, questioned them as though I were Fray
Tomas de Torquemada himself! They know less of the men we seek than do
sucking infants of sin. Come, Miguel Alvarado! It grows dark, and you
will forget your duty to the Guardia Civil if you linger long here!"
Young Alvarado flashed an angry look at him. Then, suddenly getting in
hand, he shrugged himself calm and said:
"Morales and the rest have not been here, eh? Well, let us clear our
heels of the filth of this vile-smelling place before dark, then."
Without another word, he turned his back upon the girl and went seeking
his pony among the trees. A sibilant, softly called Gypsy word, repeated
twice, and the horse came clattering through the underwood toward him
like a well-trained dog.
He mounted. Pascual Montara had gone striding across the clearing to
retrieve his own animal. The girl lingered under the trees, standing as
he had found her, her back against the trunk of an algarroba, the toes
of one nut-brown leg scratching the calf of the other, her eyes pensive.
"My Paquita," said Miguel Alvarado, sidling near her on his horse,
"there is an ancient and massive wild olive far down at the gateway to
this barranca. And it looks like a tall and handsome cavalier waiting
for the moon to rise that he may have a meeting with some Gypsy girl who
is his beloved."
She looked slowly up at him, then away.
"My Paquita," he persisted, "you have seen this wild olive, have you
not?"
She did not answer him.
"My Paquita," he said again, "you are a Gitana. Tell me; you are wise in
reading nature; will there be a moon clear of clouds to-morrow night?"
She slipped away from the trunk of the algarroba and started off toward
the clearing. Suddenly, she paused and looked back over one shoulder.
She answered his questions in the order asked.
"The wild olive is well-known to me, and there will be a fine moon
to-morrow night. But there will be no meetings at the wild olive between
you and me. I have no appetite for your caresses and kisses; I would
hate you, did I not think too little of you. You are only a cinder in my
eye! I have kept myself a virgin all these years for some man more bold
and brutal and magnificent than you!"
Pascual Montara had mounted his horse and was waiting in growing
impatience.
"Hola, mi compañero!" he called. "What is keeping you?"
Trotting his horse out into the open space where were the three fires of
black smoke and dancing embers, Alvarado joined him. Together the two
policemen rode away up the shadow-haunted alleys of the steep and narrow
barranca.
With a great gusto, the Gypsy bucks assaulted their evening meal. They
had no need of plates nor forks. Three wolfish circles of men swiftly
formed about the three steaming pots, which had been taken off the fires
and left standing upon the grass. The pots contained the ubiquitous
national dish of Spain, the puchero, that most savory of stews. Into the
pots the Gypsies dipped with their navajas--those long, wicked-looking
clasp-knives--and with their fingers.
It was like a grab-bag. In that puchero one could not know what variety
of meat or vegetable one might pluck forth. The Gitanos went at the
business of eating with a singular moroseness; they were like glum and
voracious animals. When any secured a chunk of meat too large to be
swallowed in one desperate mouthful, it was torn into more reasonable
pieces by hands and teeth, or sawed into lengths by the ever ready
navajas.
The women and children waited wistfully apart. It was not for them to
sit and eat until the last of the males had done. They were the weaker,
and they must take thankfully that which was left them by the strong.
One by one, the bucks got up from about the pots of puchero, licking
their lips and reaching for papers and tobacco. The three fires had
decayed and become mere hillocks of embers. The men formed new and more
indolent circles about these, smoking lazily, their eyes dull and
complacent with eating. Chattering like famished sparrows, their voices
sharp with eagerness, the women and children fell hastily upon the
remnants their men had left.
It was about this time that a party of cabalgadores, riding hard, passed
the massive wild olive that stood at the dingle's gateway like a
_sereno_, like a metropolitan night policeman at the corner of a dark
and narrow street. Keeping steadily on, they rode through the obscurity
of the corridorlike reaches of the barranca, and swiftly drew near the
opening among the trees and the camp of the Gypsies.
Soon they glimpsed the red of firelight through the underwood, and
caught snatches of the shrill chattering of the women and children.
There was an undertone of music from the camp, the soft reedlike notes
of an accordion, and suddenly a man's voice began chanting "The Song of
Juanito Ralli":
"The false Juanito, day and night,
Had best with caution go,
The Gypsy Cales of Yeira height
Have sworn to lay him low.
"Throughout the night, the dusky night,
I prowl in silence round,
And with my eyes look left and right,
For him, the Spanish hound,
That with my knife I him may smite,
And to the vitals wound.
"I'll wash not in the limpid flood
The shirt which binds my frame;
But in Juanito Ralli's blood
I'll bravely wash the same."
The strangers halted in the concealing underwood, drawing close
together. Words passed in whispers; then the group of five separated.
Three of the party moved slowly and quietly away through the trees; the
other two waited, motionless as rock.
At length, the feat in strategy was successfully accomplished. In each
of four sectors of the palisading circle of foliage and shadows which
surrounded the opening among the trees, there waited a man, silent and
watchful, a carbine ready in his two hands. No one of the four
dismounted, but suddenly one rode briskly out into the clearing.
"Who is this?" cried Pepe Flammenca, starting up. "Not another
policeman!"
"No, lo quiera Dios!" quietly returned the horseman. "God forbid, no!"
He halted his horse half-way to the groups about the fires. The Gypsy
fellow with the open shirt and yellow sash had abruptly quit singing and
playing the accordion. The very children were frightened into large-eyed
silence.
"Ah, you are one of the _Errate_, one of the Blood!" exclaimed
Flammenca. "It is a Zincalo that speaks, a Romano, a Cale. Is it not,
_hombre_?"
"God forbid that too!" the horseman laughed shortly. "Approach, Pepe
Flammenca, and see for yourself whom I am."
There was in his voice a certain imperious note. The gigantic Gypsy
count moved slowly forward. He peered at the brown youthful face
beneath the broad-brimmed felt.
"Jacinto Quesada!" he whispered sharply, falling back a step. He looked
over his shoulder at his Roms scattered upon the grass. They had heard
his sharply sibilated whisper; and an echo of that whisper had passed
over them as each repeated the name and sat up, dramatically moved.